Rich media applications (both interactive and non interactive) need access to diverse forms of media via the Internet, or a proprietary intranet, or on local media attached to the viewing computer. To accomplish this it is necessary to store and deliver large volumes of content. This content includes not only images, audio, video, but more complex media such as a deep zoom image, or a photosynth, or a memory dump file, or an XML text file, and so on. This more complex content may be composed of thousands of elements.